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GDW | Raptor + Conch House
Several years ago I had the experience of sitting on owner’s side of the fence – I served as chair of the owner’s committee on a good size project, and hired and managed the architect, consultants and contractor. I learned 5 keys to hiring an architect:
- It’s a long term relationship. You will be working closely with whomever you hire for the next couple of years. Be sure you hire someone you are comfortable with, that you can see yourself working with, someone that will work for you and put your interests first. Compatibility with your architect is the single most important issue. We hired an extremely talented and well known architect [designed, for example, the LA County Museum of Art] who wanted the job came in with a very low fee…but was never working “for” us…made the project long and difficult.
- It’s your house [or retail center, or…], not your architect’s house. Hire someone that will build your dream house, not theirs. Most architects have a limited “palette,” they do what they do. Few take the time truly understand what you want. Few are willing to fully put aside their wishes in favor of yours. Reasons for this include their preferences, their experience, and money–it is much less work, and thus less costly, to use the same materials, details and products from project to project. On our project, we soon came to understand that the architect we hired does what he does, not what his clients want. We had to accept that there were many things we wanted that he wouldn’t do. I could have replaced him, but only at the expense of a great deal of money and months of lost time. An architect who builds his or her dream, not yours, might easily cost you more than their entire fee as you buy materials, products and perhaps rooms you don’t want.
- Plays well with others. Our architect tolerated his consultants, and had what might be charitably called a difficult relationship with the contractor. I found myself continually having to resolve disputes, and the difficulties with the contractor cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your architect needs to foster a team spirit, and to see that the entire team is working to create your dream as painlessly and inexpensively as possible.
- Money is important. Money spent on architects is money not spent on stone, stoves or landscaping. Ultimately, though, it is the total cost that matters most. Money ineffectively spent during construction will trump all other costs together. We spent a great deal of time focusing on thousands when selecting our consultants, yet once hired, decisions made resulted in variances of millions. We learned that the key is finding consultants who put our interests, including our money, first.
- Apples and oranges are difficult to compare. One architect in Malibu charges $500,000 for every project. His fees are high yet all inclusive, and his projects varied and very custom. Another charges $125,000. His fees are loaded with extras [clients typically end up paying serval times his initial “fee”,] and most of his projects are extremely similar. If you as client see the work of the latter and are happy to let this architect make the decisions and do what he typically does, I would advise you to use him. If, on the other hand, you want to build their own dream, and that dream is significantly different that his typical house, I would advise them to use the former. The extras from the latter will end up costing more money, and you still will not get the house you want. Your architect is also forming a long term relationship with you, and committing resources for a long time. Many architects run what I might term “product production” studios. They do what they do, do it efficiently and quickly, then move on. If you like their product, you can save some design fee. Others are more client, design and process focused. Their process is focused on customization, on creating a house that is uniquely yours. If this is what you want, you will ultimately get the best value with this type of architect. We chose the former, but really needed the latter. The result was a combination of increased costs, headaches and compromised dreams.
These 5 keys to hiring an architect, if carefully followed, will make your project far more enjoyable, and the resultant design reflective of your dreams, lifestyle and budget.
TEDA Promendades Retail and Entertainment Destination
by GlobalDesign Workshop + Cuningham Group
How To Get Your Destination Design Project Started
Creating a successful resort, town center, entertainment or retail destination is your goal. But how do you get the process started? We have been through this process hundreds of times over the past twenty-five years. To ensure the success of every project we design, we have leveraged this rich experience and developed a successful methodology, a user manual of sorts describing how to successfully start and navigate the process. There are three steps to get your project underway — Research, Planning and Action.
We have assembled a number of extremely useful resources to help you with each of these three steps.
1. RESEARCH
Conduct Online Research
Learn more about your project type, what has worked elsewhere and what has not. It is key to understand how successful projects work. It is equally important to understand why. Understand how those projects are similar to yours, and how yours is different. Browse through relevant websites, and read blogs – a great way to get a better understanding of both the theory behind the creation of successful destinations as well as practical how-to blogs, such as this one, with step by step guidelines and practical case studies.
- Online resources – This GDW blog contains many useful articles that will help you get started
- Ask questions regarding strategy, programming, positioning and how to get started.
- Ask about the theory and practice of creating successful retail, resort, entertainment or town center destinations
- Ask to how to choose a design firm, whether to use a large, big name firm or a smaller dedicated design studio
- Meet with an expert, on your project site, if possible. Ask them to:
- Review your site (if you have one), suggest appropriate site attributes (if you don’t) its strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis)
- Ask detailed questions regarding strategy, programming and positioning of your project
- Discuss possible “Blue Sky” (big picture, big idea) concepts for your project
- Ask what makes a great destination
- More specifically, ask what makes a great retail destination, town center destination, entertainment destination or resort destination
- Ask about the general challenges and opportunities shared by all destination projects
- Ask about the challenges and opportunities unique to your project type
2. PLANNING
Schedule
Establish your project schedule. Set an aggressive yet achievable schedule, taking into account not only design time but also the time necessary to receive government approval and financing of your project.
Budget
Establish your project budget. Set budgets for both soft costs (Soft costs include design fees, engineering, governmental fees, financing, and legal fees, marketing costs and other pre- and post-construction expenses) and hard costs (Hard costs include land acquisition and construction expenses). At this early phase, be sure to include a significant contingency.
Project Team
- Build your project team
- Internal to your organization:
- Project manager with a knowledge of:
- Design management
- Land acquisition (as appropriate for your project)
- Governmental relations
- Financial management
- Investor relations (as appropriate)
- Leasing (as appropriate)
- Operations
- Marketing
- External consulting team:
- Strategist/Feasibility
- Architect/Master Planner
- Additionally, your architect should provide consultants from the following disciplines (as apply to your project):
- Landscape architect
- Engineers
- Cost estimator
- Specialty Consultants
- Lighting design
- Audio/Visual
- Graphic Design
- Water Features/Special Effects
- Show concept
- Sustainability/Green Design
3. ACTION
Project Analysis + Positioning
This is the first step toward creating a successful destination. It requires a minimal commitment on your part, yet gives you the tools and direction to get your project underway.
Your design professional should start with a site visit and analysis; then prepare positioning recommendations and a concept program; a concept land use diagram to conceptually establish the best uses, and placement of those uses, on your site; a written narrative describing your vision for the place you wish to create, including the experience one might expect when spending time there, as well as appropriate design metaphors or back-story; and concept image photos that both visually communicate your vision and give future direction to the design team.
You should further request and expect a presentation of findings and concept direction by your design professional, as well as professionally presented collateral materials to document the process and get your project off to a successful start.
If your first major project milestone is the approval of stakeholders such as senior managers, investors, partners or bankers, or getting approval by governmental authorities, you will need an Investor’s Package: Investors’ Package
Your design professional should still start with project analysis and positioning (as described above), but also should provide a recommended facility program outlining the major facilities and necessary area requirements; an illustrative site plan describing the arrangement, relationships and character of the place; concept diagrams indicating how guests and services access and move around your project; an aerial perspective providing an overall “bird’s eye” view of your project; and three or four ground level sketches illustrating the look and feel of your project as one would expect to experience it when construction is complete.
As described above, this package should also include image boards and a design narrative, appropriate printed and digital materials for you to use, and a professional presentation of all findings and materials by your design professional.
More information regarding an investor’s package or Full Design Services: GDW Services
If you have completed the above steps, or if you have your infrastructure in place and are on a fast track to completing a successful destination, you may desire to contract immediately for full service master planning, urban design or architectural design.
Full design services include blue sky/feasibility (what is the “Big Idea,” and is it financially feasible?); concept design (what does the “Big Idea” look like and how much will it cost?), schematic design (how will it look and feel, what are the key details and materials?), design development (how will it be built?), construction documents (make sure the contractor builds my design) and construction administration (make sure the builders understand the design and build it correctly).
Additionally, your design professional should provide consultants including Feasibility Analysis, Retail Strategy, Landscape Design, Civil, Structural and MEP Engineering, Green and Sustainable Design, Lighting Design, Graphic Design, Audio/Visual/Systems Design, Special Effects Design, Water Feature Design and Acoustic Design.
More information regarding full service design: Contact Us
Creating a successful resort, town center, entertainment or retail destination is your goal. The challenge is getting the process started. The steps above are an abbreviated version of the methodology we have developed over the years. Contact us for more details, to discuss the specifics of your project, or to request a proposal.
When an owner is looking to start a project, conventional wisdom holds that the smart choice is a large, established, “big name” design firm. To do so would seem to take the risk out of the design process, whereas hiring a smaller, “boutique” design firm might seem risky. Conventional wisdom, in this case, is wrong. Hiring a talented and experienced small firm will help is the best way to assure a project’s success. This is especially true for retail architecture, mixed-use design, town center design and destination master planning. There are six primary reasons this is true:
- Your project is important to you, be it large or small. It is the focus of your efforts, energies and attention. Your project should be equally as important to your design firm. If your design firm is small to mid-sized, your project will be large and consuming to them, the focus of their efforts, energies and attention. If the design firm is large, unless your project is as high profile as the Beijing airport or Olympic Stadium, your project is just one of their many projects. If you hire a small design team, your project will be designed by their best team, perhaps their only team, certainly by their “A” team. If you hire a large firm, you will likely get their “B” team or their “C” team.
- Large firms often “bait and switch” – introduce you to their top, most experienced design team and lead you to believe that these designers will craft your project. Yet once work starts, owners often find that the actual design team is much less experienced and accomplished. When you hire a smaller firm, the team you hire is the team that will design your project.
- A project is designed by a lead designer and a team, not a firm. When you hire a boutique design firm, a firm owner is the lead designer, and the firm is the team – the highly qualified people who will help you translate your vision into reality. When you hire a large firm you are at their mercy. If your project is extremely high profile on an international scale, you might be provided with an experienced team. If not, the team designing your project will likely be young and enthusiastic, but with limited experience in your project type or environment.
- A large firm has large overhead – expensive office space, admin teams, marketing and legal teams, a large group of expensive current and retired principals. Much of your fee necessarily must go to cover these costs. With a smaller firm, you will realize a more efficient use of your money. Your money will go to the design of your project, not to cover the firm’s overhead.
- It does not take a large team or large firm to design a large project. Not in the concept and early design stages. The best way to design a large project is to hire a small, skilled and experienced team with a well qualified leader and experience working together. Hire the team you believe in, not a “big name” without a face.
- Hire a designer, not an ego. Small studios love design and are building a reputation. Your project will help define them. If you succeed, they succeed. A “Big Name” firm is often much more interested and invested in protecting their name than in the success of your project. When your vision and their reputation collide, you lose.
A large firm adds risk to the design process, whereas a smaller yet talented and experienced “boutique” design firm greatly increases your chance of success. Hire the architect that will help you succeed, not the “Name” you think you need.
- “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”
~ Le Corbusier
- “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”
~ Philip Johnson
- “There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through”
~ Dan Rice
- “Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.”
~ Spiro Kostof
- “Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.”
~ Coco Chanel
- “Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul”
~ Ernest Dimnet
- “An architect is the drawer of dreams”
~ Grace McGarvie
- “Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music”
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
- “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
~ Laurie Anderson
- “A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”
~ Philip Johnson
- “Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.”
~ Philip Johnson
- “Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture.”
~ Malcolm Miller
- “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over”
~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Architects believe that not only do they sit at the right hand of God, but that if God ever gets up, they take the chair”
~ Karen Moyer
- “Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.”
~ Louis Henri Sullivan
- “Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “The architectural profession gave the public 50 years of modern architecture and the public’s response has been 10 years of the greatest wave of historical preservation in the history of man.”
~ George E. Hartman
- “Architecture is politics.”
~ Mitchell Kapor
- “A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.”
~ Lord Byron
- “Architecture is the work of nations”
~ John Ruskin
- “In architecture as in all other operative arts, the end must direct the operation. The end is to build well. Well building has three conditions: Commodity, Firmness and Delight.”
~ Henry Watton
- “I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]”
~ G. K. Chesterton
- “I think Miss Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. (1939)”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.”
~ J. Russell Lynes
- “Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo style of architecture.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
- “Buildings don’t exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.”
~ Paul Goldberger
- “A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts”
~ Joseph Addison
- “[It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.”
~ Robert Moses
- “True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure of us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “The long path from material through function to creative work has only one goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time. We must have order, allocating to each thing it’s proper place and giving to each thing is due according to it’s nature.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “And just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, just as we must understand functions, so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.”
~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- “I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Architecture is a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time.
~ Vincent Scully
- Why can’t we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles – and functional?
~ Charles, Prince of Wales
- You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe – when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.
~ Charles, Prince of Wales
- To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.
~ Robert A. M. Stern
- In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.
~ Le Corbusier
- Buildings should be good neighbours.
~ Paul Thiry
- Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.
~ Arthur Erickson
- A building is a string of events belonging together.
~ Chris Fawcett
- Good architecture is like a piece of beautifully composed music crystallized in space that elevates our spirits beyond the limitation of time.
~ Tao Ho
- Architecture (is) a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing.
~ Kisho Kurokawa
- I saw the bathroom fixtures as a kind of American Trinity.
~ Claes Oldenberg
- Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.
~ Alan Kay
- Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
~ Mies van der Rohe
- When you look on one of your contemporary ‘good copies’ of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.
~ Louis H. Sullivan
- Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
~ Thomas Fuller
- No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
~ John Ruskin
- Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
~ Constantin Brancusi
- The flowering of geometry.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Society needs a good image of itself. That is the job of the architect.
~ Walter Gropius
- Architecture begins when you place two bricks carefully together.
~ Mies van der Rohe
- An arch never sleeps.
~ Hindu proverb
- An architect never sleeps.
~ Brent Thompson
- Develop an infallible technique and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration.
~ Ralph Rapson
- The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls, but in the space within to be lived in.
~ Lao-Tzu
- Good architecture lets nature in.
~ Mario Pei
- Architecture should be dedicated to keeping the outside out and the inside in.
~ Leonard Baskin
- Early in life I had to choose between arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- No house should ever be on a hill, or on anything. It should be of the hill. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared?
~ Walter Gropius
- The house does not frame the view: it projects the beholder into it.
~ Harwell Hamilton Harris
- Architecture is space structured to serve man and to move him.
~ Etienne Gaboury
- Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. ‘Think simples’ as my old master used to say – meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
~ Eero Saarinen
- In speculative buildings, which is most of our business, there are really only three chances to make architecture: the lobby or entrance sequence, the top and the elevator cab.
~ Chao-Ming Wu
- A house is a machine for living.
~ Buckminster Fuller
- A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- The White House was designed by Hoban, a noted Irish-American architect, and I have no doubt that he believed by incorporating several features of the Dublin style he would make it more homelike for any President of Irish descent. It was a long wait, but I appreciate his efforts.
~ John F. Kennedy
- Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.
~ Le Corbusier
- We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
~ Winston Churchill
- I call architecture ‘petrified music’.
~ Goethe
- Form ever follows function.
~ Louis H. Sullivan
- The purpose of a structure is to meet our needs, the purpose of architecture is to thrill us.
~ Brent Thompson
TEDA Promendades Retail and Entertainment Destination
by GlobalDesign Workshop + Cuningham Group
How To Get Your Destination Design Project Started
Creating a successful resort, town center, entertainment or retail destination is your goal. But how do you get the process started? We have been through this process hundreds of times over the past twenty-five years. To ensure the success of every project we design, we have leveraged this rich experience and developed a successful methodology, a user manual of sorts describing how to successfully start and navigate the process. There are three steps to get your project underway — Research, Planning and Action.
We have assembled a number of extremely useful resources to help you with each of these three steps.
1. RESEARCH
Conduct Online Research
Learn more about your project type, what has worked elsewhere and what has not. It is key to understand how successful projects work. It is equally important to understand why. Understand how those projects are similar to yours, and how yours is different. Browse through relevant websites, and read blogs – a great way to get a better understanding of both the theory behind the creation of successful destinations as well as practical how-to blogs, such as this one, with step by step guidelines and practical case studies.
- Online resources – This GDW blog contains many useful articles that will help you get started
- Ask questions regarding strategy, programming, positioning and how to get started.
- Ask about the theory and practice of creating successful retail, resort, entertainment or town center destinations
- Ask to how to choose a design firm, whether to use a large, big name firm or a smaller dedicated design studio
- Call with questions – 888.873.1117 (toll free in the US), 001.310.684.1113 (international)
- Meet with an expert, on your project site, if possible. Ask them to:
- Review your site (if you have one), suggest appropriate site attributes (if you don’t) its strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis)
- Ask detailed questions regarding strategy, programming and positioning of your project
- Discuss possible “Blue Sky” (big picture, big idea) concepts for your project
- Ask what makes a great destination
- More specifically, ask what makes a great retail destination, town center destination, entertainment destination or resort destination
- Ask about the general challenges and opportunities shared by all destination projects
- Ask about the challenges and opportunities unique to your project type
2. PLANNING
Schedule
Establish your project schedule. Set an aggressive yet achievable schedule, taking into account not only design time but also the time necessary to receive government approval and financing of your project.
Budget
Establish your project budget. Set budgets for both soft costs (Soft costs include design fees, engineering, governmental fees, financing, and legal fees, marketing costs and other pre- and post-construction expenses) and hard costs (Hard costs include land acquisition and construction expenses). At this early phase, be sure to include a significant contingency.
Project Team
- Build your project team
- Internal to your organization:
- Project manager with a knowledge of:
- Design management
- Land acquisition (as appropriate for your project)
- Governmental relations
- Financial management
- Investor relations (as appropriate)
- Leasing (as appropriate)
- Operations
- Marketing
- External consulting team:
- Strategist/Feasibility
- Architect/Master Planner
- Additionally, your architect should provide consultants from the following disciplines (as apply to your project):
- Landscape architect
- Engineers
- Cost estimator
- Specialty Consultants
- Lighting design
- Audio/Visual
- Graphic Design
- Water Features/Special Effects
- Show concept
- Sustainability/Green Design
Call with questions – 888.873.1117 (toll free in the US), 001.310.684.1113 (international)
3. ACTION
Project Analysis + Positioning
This is the first step toward creating a successful destination. It requires a minimal commitment on your part, yet gives you the tools and direction to get your project underway.
Your design professional should start with a site visit and analysis; then prepare positioning recommendations and a concept program; a concept land use diagram to conceptually establish the best uses, and placement of those uses, on your site; a written narrative describing your vision for the place you wish to create, including the experience one might expect when spending time there, as well as appropriate design metaphors or back-story; and concept image photos that both visually communicate your vision and give future direction to the design team.
You should further request and expect a presentation of findings and concept direction by your design professional, as well as professionally presented collateral materials to document the process and get your project off to a successful start.
If your first major project milestone is the approval of stakeholders such as senior managers, investors, partners or bankers, or getting approval by governmental authorities, you will need an Investor’s Package: Investors’ Package
Your design professional should still start with project analysis and positioning (as described above), but also should provide a recommended facility program outlining the major facilities and necessary area requirements; an illustrative site plan describing the arrangement, relationships and character of the place; concept diagrams indicating how guests and services access and move around your project; an aerial perspective providing an overall “bird’s eye” view of your project; and three or four ground level sketches illustrating the look and feel of your project as one would expect to experience it when construction is complete.
As described above, this package should also include image boards and a design narrative, appropriate printed and digital materials for you to use, and a professional presentation of all findings and materials by your design professional.
More information regarding an investor’s package or Full Design Services: GDW Services
If you have completed the above steps, or if you have your infrastructure in place and are on a fast track to completing a successful destination, you may desire to contract immediately for full service master planning, urban design or architectural design.
Full design services include blue sky/feasibility (what is the “Big Idea,” and is it financially feasible?); concept design (what does the “Big Idea” look like and how much will it cost?), schematic design (how will it look and feel, what are the key details and materials?), design development (how will it be built?), construction documents (make sure the contractor builds my design) and construction administration (make sure the builders understand the design and build it correctly).
Additionally, your design professional should provide consultants including Feasibility Analysis, Retail Strategy, Landscape Design, Civil, Structural and MEP Engineering, Green and Sustainable Design, Lighting Design, Graphic Design, Audio/Visual/Systems Design, Special Effects Design, Water Feature Design and Acoustic Design.
More information regarding full service design: Contact Us
Creating a successful resort, town center, entertainment or retail destination is your goal. The challenge is getting the process started. The steps above are an abbreviated version of the methodology we have developed over the years. Contact us for more details, to discuss the specifics of your project, or to request a proposal.
